<Archive Obituaries> Federico Fellini (October 31st 1993)
Bill Schenley
Photo:
http://www.elisabettacatalano.it/comp/Primi_cinque/federico_fellini.jpg
FROM: The New York Times (November 1st 1993) ~
By Peter B. Flint
Federico Fellini, whose deeply personal films were vivid, sometimes
bizarre portraits of the human condition, died yesterday at the
Umberto I Hospital in Rome. He was 73.
The cause was cardiac arrest, the Reuters news agency reported, citing
Dr. Maurizio Bufi, the chief of the hospital's intensive care unit.
Mr. Fellini had suffered a stroke in August and had been in a coma
since he had what has been variously described as a heart attack or
heart failure on Oct. 17. Reuters said his condition deteriorated in
the last hours before his death, and he developed a high fever and
kidney problems.
Four of Mr. Fellini's movies won Oscars for best foreign-language
film: "La Strada" in 1956, "The Nights of Cabiria" in 1957, "8 1/2" in
1963 and "Amarcord" in 1974. In March, he received an honorary Oscar
in recognition of his cinematic accomplishments as a director and
screenwriter. Before his heart trouble laid him low this year, the
director had reportedly been making plans to begin work on his 21st
feature film next year, "Block Notes of a Director: The Actor."
Throughout his career, Mr. Fellini focused on his personal vision of
society and his preoccupation with the relationships between men and
women and between sex and love. An avowed anticleric, he was also
deeply concerned with guilt and alienation.
Fellini films are spiced with artifice (masks, masquerades and
circuses), startling faces, the rococo and the outlandish, the prisms
through which he sometimes viewed life. But as Vincent Canby, the
chief film critic of The New York Times, observed in 1985, "What's
important are not the prisms, though they are arresting, but the world
he shows us: a place whose spectacularly grand, studio-built
artificiality makes us see the interior truth of what is taken to be
the 'real' world outside, which is a circus."
The concepts of all Fellini movies originated in the mind of "the
Maestro," as his associates and compatriots fondly called him, in his
memories, dreams, fantasies and fancies. He was often the protagonist
of his films, and his most celebrated alter ego was Marcello
Mastroianni, in "La Dolce Vita," "8 1/2" and "City of Women."
Mr. Fellini wrote all his scripts, usually with two dialogue writers,
and supervised every creative detail, including the final editing. He
was a perfectionist who repeatedly reshot many scenes in a process
that usually took two years. He kept producers away from his films
until they were completed, explaining: "I do not need a producer. I
need only a good production manager. I need only a man who will give
me money."
Devoted to Movies, Not to Commerce
He studied his own movies many times but seldom saw other movies,
saying that most of them reflected commerce rather than art. His
devotion to movies over money was reflected in his uncommon
willingness to surrender a large share of the potential profits from
many of his films to their financial backers.
He likened his craft to applying a thermometer to a troubled world and
finding a high fever. "I'd like very much to make a confident
picture," he once told an interviewer. "I would like to be as good as
nature, which with a shower produces flowers and grass to cover the
destruction. But we are surrounded by human fragmentation, by
pessimism, and it is difficult to talk of other things."
Mr. Fellini said he sought to liberate viewers from "overidealized
concepts of life." In a lighter vein, he remarked, "I make pictures to
tell a story, to tell lies and to amuse."
Over the decades, Fellini films became increasingly original and
subjective, and consequently more controversial and less commercial.
His style evolved from neo-realism to fanciful neo-realism to
surrealism, in which he discarded narrative story lines for
free-flowing, freewheeling memoirs. He described his approach in this
way:
"When I start a picture, I always have a script, but I change it every
day, I put in what occurs to me that day, out of my imagination. You
start on a voyage; you know where you will end up, but not what will
occur along the way. You want to be surprised."
His life centered on film making. "When I am not making movies," he
confided, "I feel I am not alive."
A Series of Scenes Difficult to Forget
Fellini movies have many unexpected and indelible sequences. "La Dolce
Vita" opens with a huge statue of Jesus, with arms outstretched, being
towed inexplicably by a helicopter above the rooftops of Rome. The
film "8 1/2" ends with a quixotic film director leading all his
contentious associates, real and imagined, alive and dead, in a dance
of joyful reconciliation.
"I Vitelloni" ("The Loafers"), the third feature he directed, is an
autobiographical tragicomic tale of five provincial youths who
punctuate their aimless street life with pranks.
"La Dolce Vita" is a sensational and sobering scan of the decadent
"sweet life" of Rome's cafe society, with its sexual promiscuity,
search for exotic gratification and consuming boredom. The film
shocked many Italians and was proscribed by the Roman Catholic Church,
but it became a huge success in Italy and around the world.
"La Strada" ("The Road"), is a poetic tragedy about a simple-minded
waif who serves as the clown, cook and concubine for a boorish,
brutish strongman.
"The Nights of Cabiria" deals with a sentimental, eternally hopeful
prostitute who wistfully dreams of romance and respectability.
Mr. Fellini's most clearly autobiographical confession, "8 1/2," is an
innovative romantic satire-fantasy about an egomaniacal film maker's
moral and creative midlife crisis, his malaise and inability to make a
movie. He titled it "8 1/2" because it was his seventh directorial
feature in addition to three short films. It was his favorite movie.
"Amarcord" ("I Remember") is a paean to youth and the memories of a
year in the life of a provincial Italian town in the 1930's.
Many Movies, Even More Awards
In addition to Oscars, Fellini movies won hundreds of awards,
including many top citations at international film festivals and five
first prizes from the New York film critics.
His other movies, also with evocative scores by Nino Rota, include
"Juliet of the Spirits" (1965), his first color feature, which centers
on a neglected wife obsessed by dreams and spirits; "Fellini
Satyricon" (1969), an epic of decadence and the wanderings of a
homosexual youth in ancient Rome's disintegrating society; "The
Clowns"(1970), and "Fellini's Roma" (1972).
Others were "Fellini's Casanova" (1976), a spectacular but joyless
saga of the 18th-century philanderer's conquests across Europe;
"Orchestra Rehearsal" (1979), the most political Fellini film, which
uses an orchestra as a metaphor for a fragmenting society, and "City
of Women" (1979), a feminist fantasy in which the hero searches
incorrigibly for the perfect woman.
Later films also include "And the Ship Sails On" (1983), a flamboyant
succession of mostly comic commentaries on art and self-absorbed
artists; "Ginger and Fred" (1986), whose central characters are an
Italian dance couple who chose their names in honor of the American
dance team and who are reunited on a television variety show, and
"Intervista" (1987), a mock documentary described by Mr. Canby in a
review as "a magical mixture of recollection, parody, memoir, satire,
self-examination and joyous fantasy."
"Tutto Fellini," a retrospective of his films, started on Friday and
is to continue through Dec. 21 at Film Forum in Greenwich Village.
Scoffed at Questions About Meaning
Mr. Fellini was impatient with interviewers who suggested that his
films had been inspired by works he had not read and who pressed him
with questions about the meanings of his imagery. "Meaning, always
meaning!" he scoffed. "When someone asks, 'What do you mean in this
picture?,' it shows he is a prisoner of intellectual, sentimental
shackles. Without his meaning, he feels vulnerable."
Admirers said Fellini films were resplendent and exhilarating, and
reflected a deepening and an enhancement of his art. They also
believed that his later movies showed maturing, self-critical
insights.
After the mid-1960's, his films often stressed the bizarre, the garish
and the grotesque. Detractors praised some sequences, but variously
termed the works excessive, simplistic and self- obsessed.
Nonetheless, the consensus was that he made brave and original movies
about important issues.
Mr. Canby praised Mr. Fellini for a dazzling inventiveness and skill
and an "insatiable curiosity about and fondness for the human animal,
especially those who maintain only the most tenuous holds on their
dignity or sanity." At his top form, he "somehow brings out the best
in us," Mr. Canby wrote. "We become more humane, less stuffy." Hailing
Mr. Fellini's "very special, personal kind of cinema," the critic
concluded, "one of Fellini's greatest gifts is his ability to
communicate a sense of wonder, which has the effect of making us all
feel much younger than we have any right to."
Discovering Life Through Films
Federico Fellini was born on Jan. 20, 1920, in Rimini, an Adriatic
port and resort in north-central Italy. His upbringing was provincial,
religious and middle class. His father, Urbano, was a prosperous
seller of coffee and other grocery specialties whose frequent travels
left his wife, Ida, as the main parent for Federico, his brother,
Riccardo, and his sister, Maddalena.
The film maker, fancifully recounting his youth, repeatedly told
interviewers that he ran away from home at the age of 7 or 8 to join a
circus, but later he smilingly acknowledged he had fabricated the
brief episode "to help journalists" explain his fascination for
circuses.
The youth attended religious boarding schools, where his chief talent
was drawing and his chief adversaries were the rigid friars who often
punished him for breaking minor rules.
In 1985, he told a New York audience that his love of film making
originated in Rimini's primitive movie house, which, he said, had 200
seats and standing room for 500. Of 1930's American movies, he
recalled, "I discovered there existed another way of life, a country
of wide-open spaces, of fantastic cities that were a cross between
Babylon and Mars." He was speaking at a gala Fellini tribute offered
by the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
At the age of 17 or 18, according to his varying accounts, he left
home for Florence, where he worked for several months as a proofreader
and cartoonist. He went on to Rome, enrolling at the University of
Rome's law school, but he did not attend classes and used his student
status to avoid conscription while he worked as a cartoonist and
short-story writer for a satirical publication, Marc' Aurelio. He
later used his cartooning talent to draw characters and scenes for his
movies.
At 19, he joined a vaudeville troupe, traveling across Italy and
working primarily as a gag writer while performing utility tasks. The
year, he recalled, "was perhaps the most important year of my life."
"I was overwhelmed by the variety of the country's physical landscape
and, too, by the variety of its human landscape," he said. "It was the
kind of experience that few young men are fortunate enough to have: a
chance to discover the character of one's country and, at the same
time, to discover one's own identity."
Back in Rome, he wrote radio scripts and started collaborating on film
scripts. In 1943, after a four-month courtship, he married the actress
Giulietta Masina, later the star of many Fellini films, including "La
Strada," "The Nights of Cabiria," "Juliet of the Spirits" and "Ginger
and Fred." She was a major inspiration for his life and work, and is
his only survivor.
His efforts to avoid the World War II draft appeared doomed in 1943
when he was ordered to undergo a medical examination. But according to
Ephraim Katz's "Film Encyclopedia," his records were destroyed in a
bombing. Later, by hiding in Rome's slums, he eluded German Occupation
troops, who regularly searched the city for Italian men to replenish
the armed forces or to toil in slave-labor camps.
Present at the Start Of a Renaissance
In 1944, soon after the Allies liberated Rome, he and several friends
opened the Funny Face Shop, a highly prosperous arcade that provided
Allied troops with caricatures, portraits, photos and voice recordings
for their families. The film director Roberto Rossellini visited the
shop and asked him to collaborate on a documentary about the Nazis'
occupation of Rome. The venture evolved into "Open City" (1945), a
benchmark neo-realistic movie that ignited Italy's postwar film
renaissance.
Mr. Fellini was the assistant director of "Open City" and a co-writer
and assistant director of Mr. Rossellini's second celebrated antiwar
film, "Paisan" (1946), and his controversial religious film, "The
Miracle" (1948), in which Mr. Fellini was co-star with Anna Magnani.
He also became known as Mr. Rossellini's idea man.
After several stints as a co-writer or assistant director for Pietro
Germi and Alberto Lattuada, Mr. Fellini made his directorial debut in
1951, collaborating with Mr. Lattuada on "Variety Lights," a
comedy-drama about the ups and downs of a troupe of third-rate
traveling vaudevillians. (It was not released in the United States
until 1965.) His first solo directorial effort was the 1951 "White
Sheik," released here in 1956, a broad lampoon of Italy's adult
comic-strip industry. Both movies were critical and commercial
failures, but they were later re-released and praised.
Determined to direct films, Mr. Fellini struggled financially to
complete his next project, "I Vitelloni," which became a major success
in Italy and abroad. He consolidated his international prestige with
"La Strada."
The film maker was an exuberant, articulate, bearlike man with an
expressive face, a whimsical charm and a spontaneous, demonstrative
manner. He often gestured with both hands, even while driving one of
his favorite motor cars.
Tolerant Overseer Of Sets of Babel
On movie sets, he savored his power as the ringmaster of a
Felliniesque world. Jauntily wearing a wide-brimmed, usually black
hat, he dominated the scene, alternately improvising, quipping and
clowning. Some directors insist on silence on the set, but he
preferred a touch of chaos.
He liked to shoot scenes sequentially, but he usually did not care in
what language performers spoke because he dubbed most dialogue, often
using other actors to do so because he believed the voices of most
people did not match their looks.
Over the years, he directed thousands of nonprofessional actors. He
was very demanding of performers, usually cajoling them to get what he
wanted, and he coaxed many professionals to give the best performances
of their careers.
For decades, the Fellinis had a small apartment in Rome for
convenience, but their principal home was a modest seaside house he
built in 1965 in the suburb of Fregene.
He read widely in his youth but later concentrated on newspaper
articles, which provided grist for his imagination. Asked once by a
friend when he planned to take a vacation, he replied quickly: "Making
a movie is my vacation. All the rest, the traveling about to
premieres, the interviews, the social life, the endless arguments with
producers who don't understand me, that is the work."
He is survived by his wife.
A POET WHO SANG A SONG OF HIMSELF
Federico Fellini was a poet of the cinema whose work, illuminated by
unforgettable images, was intensely autobiographical. These are some
of his films and when they were made, followed by the dates of release
in the United States.
The White Sheik 1951 (1956)
I Vitelloni 1953 (1956)
La Strada 1954 (1956)
Nights of Cabiria 1956 (1957)
La Dolce Vita 1960 (1961)
Boccaccio '70 1962 (1962)
8 1/2 1963 (1963)
Il Bidone 1955 (1964)
Variety Lights 1950 (1965)
Juliet of the Spirits 1965 (1965)
Fellini Satyricon 1969 (1969)
The Clowns 1970 (1970)
Amarcord 1973 (1974)
Orchestra Rehearsal 1978 (1979)
City of Women 1979 (1979)
And the Ship Sails On 1983 (1983)
Ginger and Fred 1986 (1986)
Intervista 1987 (1992)
Voices of the Moon 1990 (1993)
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Photo: http://www.born-today.com/Today/pix/fellini_f.jpg
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FROM: The Independent (November 1st 1993) ~
By Gilbert Adair
Federico Fellini, film director: born Rimini 20 January 1920; Academy
Award for Best Foreign Film for La Strada 1956, for Le Notti di
Cabiria 1957, for 81 2 1963, for Amarcord 1974, Special Academy Award
for Lifetime Achievement in the Film Industry 1993; married 1943
Giulietta Masina (one son deceased); died Rome 31 October 1993.
IN 1971 the veteran American film- maker Frank Capra called his
autobiography The Name above the Title. Though that may seem
unbecomingly immodest, it was in fact historically justified, as a
reflection of the fact that in the early Thirties, when he was
gradually consolidating his reputation, Capra was virtually the sole
Hollywood director whose name was perceived, by critics and public
alike, as an asset, almost as a production value - a name, therefore,
which wholly merited its unique prominence on the billing of his
films. How times have changed! These days practically every film-maker
of note (or, frequently, of mere pretension to note) will ensure,
contractually if need be, that his name is emblazoned above the title,
and it is thus a measure of the quite exceptional prestige long
enjoyed by Federico Fellini that his name often was the title. Fellini
Satyricon, Fellini Roma, Fellini's Casanova - never, perhaps, in the
entire history of the medium, has a series of films been so
intimately, exclusively, identified with the man who directed them.
But then, never in the history of the medium has one had the
impression (when entering the cinema to see one of Fellini's films,
one of his later films at least) that one was also entering an
artist's head. Fellini was the prime example of an artist capable of
transforming himself into a work of art, a man who could, by some
mysterious alchemical process, turn himself into a film. So much so
that, for any spectator who did not admire Fellini himself, and who
was unwilling to embark on his gaudy treadmill of circuses and comic
strips, cardinals and carnivals, Barnum and ballet, there was
absolutely nothing remaining in his work, neither a plotline nor a
performance, not a single ''un- Fellinian'' element, to which one
could respond.
Such, indeed, was the director's solipsistically personal investment
in his own body of work that one tends to imagine, in retrospect, that
the Maestro himself was as ubiquitous on the screen as off it.
Actually, it was only in three of his films that Fellini made extended
appearances, I Clowns (The Clowns, 1970), Roma (1972), and, his
penultimate work, Intervista (Fellini's Interview, 1987, and in
Britain released only as a video). Otherwise, he had recourse to a
series of rather flattering alter egos, most famously Marcello
Mastroianni (who increasingly came to resemble his creator, just as
Jean-Pierre Leaud increasingly came to resemble Truffaut) in La Dolce
Vita (1959), 81 2 (1963), La Citta delle Donne (City of Women, 1980),
Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred, 1986) and, finally, confronting his
own mirror-image face to face, Intervista.
Unusually, too, when several of his films went out on international
release, their titles were left in the original language, almost as
though there were a serious risk of their sounding not just less
Italian but less indelibly ''Fellinian'' in translation. Thus I
Vitelloni (1953) has never been known as The Loafers, La Strada (1954,
the film that established him) as The Road, Il Bidone (1955) as The
Swindle, La Dolce Vita as The Sweet Life nor Amarcord (1973) as I
Remember. (That last title was half-invented, half-derived from
''amarcor'', a word in Romagnola patois: it is probable, though, that
its primary appeal to the director lay less in its sense than in its
sound, which he liked to compare to that of Kurosawa's Rashomon.)
Fellini's films may be said to distil the very essence of cinematic
spectacle; and, critical cliche as it may be, it has become impossible
to refer to those films without equally referring to their ultimate
source of inspiration, the circus. The circus, however, not only as a
spectacle but as one of the last truly collective experiences. Part of
what makes his work so pleasurable is our vivid sense, simply by
watching one of his films, of what it must have been like to be
involved in its creation. It's not too fanciful to suggest that we
actually feel transported to the vast, draught-haunted sound stages of
Cinecitta, with actors, extras, freaks, sycophants and hangers-on, the
by now familiar fauna and flora of Felliniana, appearing to enjoy
absolutely equal status with one another; with the relaxed and
negligent, on occasion infelicitous but always festive and
carnivalesque mise-en-scene of the completed work tendering the
spectator what he or she cannot help suspecting is a fairly
transparent mirror-image of the noisy, fractious, exuberant
caravanserai that was the shoot that both preceded and engendered it;
with above all, the cast's and crew's faith (in the film's future in
the Maestro's own genially tyrannical presence) exuding from every
pore of the screen.
Every film, of course, also constitutes a documentary of its shoot,
but Fellini's actually function through a sometimes latent, sometimes
overt acknowledgement of film-making as a communal undertaking, in so
far as they contrive to obscure the immemorial distinction between
those in front of the camera (the cast) and those behind it (the
crew), as equally between those up there on the screen and those of us
down here, so to speak, in the auditorium.
Federico Fellini was born in Rimini, on Italy's northern Adriatic
coast, in 1920, into a middle-class family (his father was a
salesman), and from his infancy was fascinated by the circuses,
fairgrounds and music halls which played a prominent part in the
seasonal routine of that pleasant resort city. As he was to become one
of the most overtly autobiographical of film-makers - ''If I were to
make a film about the life of a flatfish,'' he once remarked to an
interviewer, ''it would end up being about me'' - almost every aspect
of his early life can be related thematically to his filmic passions,
obsessions and preoccupations. But as, even in casual conversation,
the fabled fertility of his imagination would consistently compromise
the factual basis of his reminiscences (as is most flagrantly the case
with Amarcord, a flamboyantly loving evocation of his boyhood in
Rimini), much of that early life is now inextricable from the
fantasies that he ceaselessly embroidered around it. It does seem
likely, however, that as a seven-year-old child he ran away from
boarding school to join a travelling circus - just as, in his late
adolescence, he would run away, as it were, to join the cinema.
In 1938, after a few years of an idling, trifling and rather aimless
existence as a teenager in Rimini in the company of three or four
youths of his own age, precisely the sort of existence he would later
portray in I Vitelloni, an existence devoted to listless seductions
and the perpetration of coarsely mischievous pranks, and after six
months spent in Florence as a cartoonist for a comic-strip magazine
(an experience that he would exploit in the first of his wholly
personal films, Lo Sceicco bianco, The White Sheikh, 1952, a
delightful comedy set in the world of the fumetti, or strip cartoons),
he finally found in himself the courage (exactly as does his handsome
young analogue in Roma) to stake out a space for himself in the
capital.
It was there, during the war, that he was befriended by the elderly
actor and music-hall comedian Aldo Fabrizi, who appointed him as his
company's resident ''poet'', a position which seemed to encompass that
of wardrobe master, scenery designer, personal secretary and even bit
actor. This experience, which lasted until the liberation of Rome in
1944, provided invaluable background material for Fellini's very first
feature, Luci del Varieta (Variety Lights, 1950), an affecting comedy-
drama of music-hall life co-directed with Alberto Lattuada. And, in
the wake of the liberation, he opened his self-styled ''Funny Face
Shop'' in Rome, an arcade supplying American GIs with thumbnail
portraits and caricatures (by Fellini himself), candid photographs and
voice-recordings, for immediate delivery to the United States. Not
only did the store's instant success make Fellini relatively affluent
in a period of extreme material hardship, it was there, by chance,
that he met Roberto Rossellini, with whom he would collaborate as
scenarist on two of the supreme masterpieces of Italian neorealism,
Roma citta aperta (Open City, 1945) and Paisa (Paisan, 1946).
Only two more encounters were necessary for his mythology to be
complete.
The first, in 1943, was with the actress Giulietta Masina, whom he
would categorically describe as ''the greatest influence in my life''
and who, of course, would be the unloved and unforgettable Gelsomina
of La Strada, a Fellinian cartoon teased into heartbreaking life,
Charlie Chaplin reincarnated as a woman. Masina performed for her
husband intermittently but regularly throughout his career, as a
prostitute in Le Notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria, 1956), a bored
middle-class housewife in the almost too gorgeously kaleidoscopic
Giulietta degli Spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits, 1965, a clear
precursor of Woody Allen's Alice, just as 81 2 inspired his Stardust
Memories and Amarcord his Radio Days) and the ageing but still game
Ginger of Ginger and Fred (1986).
The other, in 1952, was with the composer Nino Rota, who would write
the score of every single Fellini film until his death in 1979. It is
even possible to argue that Rota's death was not only a personal but a
professional tragedy for the film-maker. Since what his music, with
its irresistibly motoric rhythms and roguishly swooning melodic lines
(witty, nostalgic Europeanised paraphrases of Kern and Berlin), called
for on-screen was a sort of treadmill trot, part- danced,
part-shuffled, with the director's dramatis personae either advancing
laterally along layered planes of movement which appeared as spatially
discrete from each other as theatre flats, as in the excursion out to
the ocean liner in Amarcord, or propelled by a circusy, conga-like
rotation (or Rotation), as during the delirious, Fellinissimus
apotheosis of 81 2 , one might also suggest that Rota was more airily,
seamlessly ''Fellinian'' than the Maestro himself.
The great, defining schism of Fellini's career came with La Dolce
Vita, an extraordinarily lengthy and ambitious satire of contemporary
Roman high society which was anathematised both by the Vatican and the
Italian government, but also proved a sensation at the 1960 Cannes
Festival and became not only a world-wide success but a phenomenon
such as the cinema has seldom known. (Its title instantly entered
every European language and is still, in English, in common currency.)
The Maestro had never been especially interested in straightforward
linear narrative, his plotlines, if they can so be called, being
always rambling and episodic. But the film which succeeded La Dolce
Vita, 81 2 , ''the story of a film director who is trying to pull
together the pieces of his life and make sense of them'', in Fellini's
own words, was the first to dispense with narrative coherence of any
conventional kind, choosing instead to let fact and fantasy spin
indiscriminately through a blender of black-and-white imagery as
mouth- watering as a box of liquorice allsorts.
It was a style to which Fellini would remain thereafter faithful - in
the eerily erotic Satyricon (1969), a work closer to the tradition of
science fiction than to that of conventional historical reconstruction
(it was widely compared to Kubrick's 2001), in the gross, almost
medieval 18th century that he devised for Casanova, and in the homage
to that communal masturbatorium that the cinema used to be in City of
Women, three films in which Fellini's normally warm Mediterranean
lyricism is chilled by a shiver from the void.
These, and other, late works have always divided critics: as far as
certain commentators are concerned, the word self-indulgent might have
been coined expressly for them. It was Fellini's own feeling, however,
voiced on several occasions, that to limit one's admiration to his
early, more modest films was simply an example of ''arrested
development'', and history will surely prove him right. For only a
pinchpenny soul would denigrate the generosity, even on occasion the
profligacy, of the powers of invention which, again and again, he
displays in them. He was, in reality, one of the century's great
inventors of forms, and had more ideas than he knew what to do with.
If uneven, his achievement was also priceless - a curate's egg,
perhaps, but by Faberge.
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Photo:
http://www.musical.it/album/cabiria/images/fotocast/fellini1b.JPG
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Fellini, Legendary Film Director Of Italy, Dies
The Five-Time Oscar Winner Translated Highly Personal Material
Into Phantasmagorical Screen Images
FROM: The Los Angeles Times (November 1st 1993) ~
By Peter Rainer, Staff Writer
Federico Fellini, five-time Academy Award-winning director whose
movies could be defined internationally in a single word,
"Fellini-esque," died Sunday in a Rome hospital two weeks after he
fell into a coma. He was 73.
Fellini, who suffered heart failure and went into a coma Oct. 17, died
at Umberto Primo Hospital of cardiac arrest. His brain stopped
functioning Thursday and doctors abandoned hope for his recovery. He
had been ill since a stroke in August.
"An immense void remains in the richness of Italian art," Italian
President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro said in a message to actress Giulietta
Masina, who observed the 50th anniversary of her wedding to Fellini
only Saturday.
"A great light has gone out," said actress Sophia Loren from her
California ranch.
Actor Marcello Mastroianni, whom Fellini cast as the archetypal Latin
lover in "La Dolce Vita" and who starred in many of his other films,
grasped for words: "How can I capture in a comment the genius of a
director and my sincere friendship with him? It would be better to
reflect in order to understand how great this man was."
In Los Angeles, Directors Guild of America President Gene Reynolds
said: "Fellini was an uncompromising genius, individualistic, drawing
from the storehouse of his own personal experience. He was courageous,
always in pursuit of the truth, instinctive and surprising. We've lost
a poet in film."
The term "Fellini-esque," coined from the Italian filmmaker's name,
evokes an orgy of rich, roiling carnival-like imagery, leering
gargoyle faces and sumptuous decadence. But this phantasmagoria is by
no means all that Fellini conjured up in his directorial career.
His legend began with such early classics as "La Strada," which in
1954 won him his first Oscar, and "Nights of Cabiria," which won him
another in 1957.
His reputation grew through the scandalous "La Dolce Vita" in 1960,
which was condemned by the Vatican as obscene because of its portrayal
of decadence and promiscuity, but which won the prestigious Palme d'Or
at Cannes.
His masterpiece "8 1/2" and "Amarcord" won him two more Oscars in 1963
and 1974. His final films, "L' Intervista" ("The Interview") and "The
Voice of the Moon," brought to a close a career in which the artist's
stream of consciousness reached full flood.
Fellini was honored last March with a special Academy Award for
lifetime achievement.
Il maestro (Italian for "the master") or il mago ("the magician") was
born Jan. 20, 1920, in the provincial town of Rimini on the Adriatic
Coast. It was to be the location -- either real or imagined -- for
some of his most resonant movies, including the 1953 "I Vitelloni,"
his first international success, and, much later, "Amarcord."
Although Fellini once described his middle-class childhood in an
interview as being exceptionally happy, his rebellions started early.
As a boy of 7, or perhaps 12 (Fellini was always mischievously vague
about the particulars of his autobiography) he briefly ran away with a
traveling circus, returning to his parents within several days. The
escapade opened his eyes to the tawdry magic of show business and set
in motion one of his great passions -- the circus as a metaphor for
life's experiences.
Another of his passions was fired when he was sent to a private boys
academy 30 miles north of Rimini and incurred the wrath of the priests
he mercilessly caricatured in sketches. (He was taught obedience by
kneeling on kernels of dried corn.)
Heading for Florence in 1938, Fellini worked as a proofreader and
newspaper comic-strip cartoonist, then moved on to Rome, intending to
become a famous journalist.
Instead, he wrote satirical magazine pieces and radio comedy sketches
and then hooked up with a group of bohemian writers and actors,
including Aldo Fabrizi. The two set out on a countrywide tour of Italy
with a traveling vaudeville troupe, where Fellini did everything from
writing gags to painting sets.
Fellini described this period for The Saturday Evening Post in 1966:
"That was perhaps the most important year of my life. I was
overwhelmed by the variety of the country's physical landscape and,
too, by the variety of its human landscape. It was the kind of
experience that few young men are fortunate enough to have -- a chance
to discover the character . . . of one's own country and, at the same
time, to discover one's own identity."
When Fabrizi was given the lead role in a movie, the 1942 "Come On In,
There's Room," Fellini was hired as a scriptwriter, and soon he was
regularly scripting comedies.
A year later he met and married Masina, to whom he was first attracted
after hearing her voice on a radio comedy series for which he had
written. Masina was to become the star of some of his finest movies,
most famously "Nights of Cabiria," where she played a waif-like
prostitute, and "La Strada," where her moon-faced, clown-like
Gelsomina was opposite Anthony Quinn's brutal strongman Zampano.
After the liberation of Rome, Fellini opened an arcade, The Funny Face
Shop, for American GIs, where he was visited by Roberto Rossellini.
The documentary that Rossellini asked Fellini to help script turned
into the pioneering 1945 dramatic feature "Open City," one of the key
works of the Italian neo-realist movement, which often used real
locations and non-actors to convey the immediacy and squalor of
experience.
A year later Fellini co-scripted and acted as assistant director on
Rossellini's extraordinary "Paisa" and scripted and acted opposite
Anna Magnani in the director's short film "The Miracle," where he
played a tramp who seduces a shepherdess who mistakes him for St.
Joseph.
The film was Fellini's first encounter with official displeasure. In
the United States, conservative Catholics pressured the New York State
Board of Regents into banning the film shortly after it opened in
December, 1950. It took a year and a half of litigation before the
U.S. Supreme Court finally reversed the ban.
By this time, Fellini was beginning to make inroads as a film
director. "Variety Lights," which he co-directed with Alberto
Lattuada, drew on his traveling-player experiences. His next film,
which he directed solo, the 1951 "The White Sheik," starred Alberto
Sordi and dealt broadly and affectionately with the world of fumetti,
the Italian photo comic books.
It was Fellini's next film, "I Vitelloni," that signaled the arrival
of a major artist. A movie about aimless youths in Rimini, it conveyed
a deep-seated longing so personal and expressive that it won the
Silver Lion award at the 1953 Venice Film Festival and gave Fellini
his first international audience.
His next feature, "La Strada," remains one of his most extraordinary
achievements. It also moved Fellini away from the strictures of
neo-realism and into a more fanciful, frankly lyrical realm. "Nights
of Cabiria" not only brought Fellini his second Oscar but confirmed
Masina's gifts. (Charlie Chaplin called her "the actress I admire
most.")
In 1960, "La Dolce Vita" featured Mastroianni, who would become
Fellini's closest and most frequent collaborator, as a journalist in a
modern-day Rome awash in depravity and retribution. Mastroianni was
playing, in effect, the Fellini role: the provincial who came to Rome
and discovered corruption. The film's famous images -- such as the
Valkyrean Anita Ekberg awash in the Trevi Fountains, or the statue of
Christ being flown over Rome, or the shots of buzzing paparazzi --
were eye-openers for art-house audiences accustomed to more sedate
fare.
"La Dolce Vita" ushered in the high-style, party-giver period in
Fellini's career, and it signaled his fascination with the
transgressions of the moneyed classes. (Up until this point his movies
had always been about the poor and the working class.)
His next feature-length film, "8 1/2," was a genre unto itself: the
autobiographical phantasmagoria. The film's title referred to the
number of films -- seven features and three shorts -- that Fellini had
made up until that time. Mastroianni played Guido, the famous film
director who has run into a creative block, and yet the film seemed to
unblock a vivid storehouse of the director's personal memories and
inspirations.
Fellini came as close in that film as any film artist ever has to
transferring dream states onto film. The Oscar winner became the
inspiration of directors as disparate as Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese
and Paul Mazursky, who, in his "Alex in Wonderland," actually got
Fellini to appear as himself in a cameo.
With "Juliet of the Spirits," Fellini's first color film, he moved
further into the fantastical, attempting to create a tutti-frutti,
dream-like whirligig. Masina's Juliet escaped into her florid dreams
in that film, and some critics began to question whether Fellini
himself was escaping into ever more flamboyantly private fantasies in
his films.
"Fellini Satyricon" in 1969 was ostensibly derived from Petronius but
bubbled up its Roman orgy excesses from what appeared to be a Cecil B.
De Mille fever dream.
"The Clowns" in 1970 brought Fellini partway back to Earth, as he
celebrated, mostly through interviews, the survivors of the circus
clown tradition that had so enraptured him as a child.
Another quasi-documentary, "Fellini's Roma" in 1972, was vivid and
impressionistic -- a swirling paean to a city that had become as
central to his artistic imagination as the mythical Yoknapatawpha
County had been to William Faulkner.
"Amarcord" in 1974, which brought Fellini his fourth Oscar, was a
return to his Rimini roots, and in the opinion of most critics, his
finest film since "8 1/2." It was simpler and more heartfelt than the
films he had been making, and it was flush with resplendent imagery,
such as the shot of a peacock suddenly spreading its blue and gold
tail into the snowy night.
Fellini worked out private themes in his movies with such intensity
that there often seemed to be no division between the artist and his
autobiography. But "Amarcord" had a retrospective power that seemed to
touch him in a way that his more recent and much of his subsequent
work failed to do.
"Fellini's Casanova" in 1976, with a leering, dispirited Donald
Sutherland in the title role, turned off many of Fellini's most loyal
audiences. Fellini the celebrated cinematic orgiast had turned sour
and chilly.
Fellini made an uneven attempt at political satire with "Orchestra
Rehearsal," which he made for Italian television, with the warring
orchestra members symbolizing Italy's warring factions.
"City of Women" in 1980 showcased Mastroianni as a kind of randy,
beleaguered Everyman adrift in a swirl of predatory females and
provoked charges of misogyny.
"And the Ship Sails On" in 1983 was waterlogged with metaphor -- its
1914 luxury ocean liner was the most metaphorical vessel since
Katherine Anne Porter's "Ship of Fools" -- but the film was superbly
designed and full of wonderful, stylized shots of the ocean liner
moving royally into the voluminous fog.
Fellini's last film to receive wide distribution in America, "Ginger
and Fred" in 1986, brought Mastroianni and Masina together as aging
dance hall stars reuniting for a television special. The film gave
Fellini ample opportunities to target TV, which he had come to believe
was the cause for the decline in the reception of his work.
His last two films, "L' Intervista" and "The Voice of the Moon,"
finally received limited U.S. distribution in the early 1990s, years
after their completion.
In a 1993 interview with The Times in Rome, Fellini complained that
"TV has distorted the taste of knowing how to narrate a story, look at
an image, be together in silence, to go into the theater and wait for
the lights to go out."
Fellini, for all his air of majesty, could be self-deprecating. In
that same interview, he said, "When journalists ask me, all animated
and with the best of intentions, 'Why did you make that film?' the
answer is always the same:
"I sign a contract, I get an advance, I don't want to give it back . .
. and so I make the film."
His body will lie in state in a closed casket for the public to pay
respects Tuesday in Studio 5 (where "La Dolca Vita" was filmed) of
Cinecitta, the Italian film studio that became Fellini's forum.
A funeral Mass will be said Wednesday by Rome Cardinal Achille
Silvestrini in Santa Maria Degli Angeli church in Rome's Piazza della
Repubblica. Burial will be in Fellini's native Rimini.
Federico Fellini: 1920-1993
Federico Fellini -- a charismatic figure known for his extravagant
temperament and individual style -- has died at 73. Highlights of the
five-time Academy Award winning director's film career include:
* La Strada, 1954
* Le Notti di Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria), 1957
* La Dolce Vita, 1960
* 8 1/2, 1963
* Fellini Satyricon, 1969
* I Clown (The Clowns), 1970 (for Italian television)
* Roma (Fellini's Roma), 1972
* Amarcord, 1973
* Casanova, 1976
* La Citta delle Donne (City of Women), 1980
* Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred), 1986
* L'Intervista (The Interview), 1987
* La Voce della Luna (The Voice of the Moon), 1990
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Photo:
http://www.theage.com.au/ffxImage/urlpicture_id_1066631354328_2003/10/20/federico_fellini,0.jpg